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California Wildfires Spread Across Hills, Leveling Homes

Scorched hillsides at San Marcos, Calif., seen in a long photo exposure early on Friday.Credit
Stuart Palley/European Pressphoto Agency

ESCONDIDO, Calif. — With fire rolling swiftly down the hill toward their houses on Thursday, Jeff Brown, his brother and his grandmother were forced by sheriff’s deputies to flee the two homes here that the family has occupied since the 1960s.

Mr. Brown, 38, was back just an hour later. His house was untouched, but his grandmother’s home was gone — only the chimney still stood. “Damn, you can’t even tell there was a three-bedroom house here,” Mr. Brown said, as he walked across the property on Friday. “The trailer in the back is gone. The shed was over there, where that gray pile is. Everything is gone.”

At the end of a week in which 11 wildfires consumed nearly 20,000 acres across San Diego County, residents and officials here were just beginning to assess the damage and determine the causes, even as fire crews continued struggling to get five of the blazes under control. At least seven homes across the county were damaged, along with two commercial buildings and an apartment complex, county officials said. One body was found in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. And three people have been arrested in connection with setting small fires, the district attorney said.

“I wish I could say that we’re done,” said Dianne Jacob, a San Diego County supervisor, of the series of fires that began on Tuesday. “Day 4 is a much better day than the preceding days we’ve seen, but the difficult days for San Diegans are not over.”

For Mr. Brown, there was not even any rubble worth picking through. His grandmother, Doris Brown, 83, had been a book collector. But her book collection, her jewelry and generations of family photographs were lost amid a gray pile of twisting metal, shattered glass and ash, which was still smoldering on Friday.

Photo

Fire crews in Escondido at the site of a burned home. Wildfires burned nearly 20,000 acres in San Diego County this week, officials said.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“It’s terrible — I grew up here,” said Mr. Brown, who installs flooring for a living. “The family pictures of all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren is what we’ll miss the most, and her books. If you go sifting through that, you’ll probably find some melted gold. She had a lot of jewelry.”

The hills above the neighborhood were scorched. A house next door had also burned down. Trees were incinerated and, at the edge of the property, a cactus hung limply over the fence. The front bumper of a pickup truck had been melted off. But the rest of the neighborhood appeared to have been spared.

Mr. Brown was still using a sprinkler to spray water on his house, in case the wind kicked up again. He said he had never been evacuated before in nearly 40 years of living there.

“I’ve seen fire up on the mountain before, but it’s never come into the valley like this,” he said.

The week felt hard to fathom for many people around San Diego County, with triple-digit temperatures and unseasonably high winds — plus three years of drought, which had left the landscape almost eager to burn and contributed to a succession of fires that shook residents’ sense of safety.

A firenado, or fire swirl, was even spotted in the Carlsbad fire, set off by rising hot air which is set in motion by wind. While usually small and brief, they can be dangerous for firefighters, who were already struggling to control the blazes under hot, dry conditions.

Still, the sky over northern parts of San Diego County looked apocalyptic, clouded with plumes of dark brown smoke from three fires that continued to burn on the grounds of Camp Pendleton, a Marine base. Winds moved smoke more than 100 miles north, obscuring the downtown Los Angeles skyline for much of Friday morning; air quality officials issued a smoke advisory for much of the region.

“This is different than anything before, especially with so many fires all over the joint,” said Lu Ziegler, 74, who was forced to leave the mobile home park where she lived on Thursday. “It makes you wonder.”

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Bonnie Dumanis, the San Diego County district attorney, said the cause of each fire was being investigated, and the three people who were arrested did not appear to be connected to any of the larger fires in the area. One fire earlier in the week was started accidentally at a construction site, officials said.

On Friday, many people still could not return to their homes around San Marcos, north of San Diego, where firefighters were still working to control the Cocos fire, which had destroyed the homes in Escondido on Thursday.

At an evacuation center at a high school in San Marcos, displaced residents huddled around a television, hoping for news that the evacuation order would soon be lifted.

Photo

In Oceanside, Calif., a plume of smoke from wildfires at nearby Camp Pendleton rose above a residential neighborhood.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Jerry Archibald had kept his eye trained on a huge American flag planted on a hillside near his home. “That’s what we’ve been watching through the night, because if that hill catches fire and that flag goes, our neighborhood could go,” said Mr. Archibald, 47, as he tossed a football with his wife and 7-year-old son on the high school field.

It was the first time they had been forced to evacuate. They left home on Wednesday night, bringing a few days of clothes and important documents. “I don’t see any fire near us now, so I think we’re in pretty good shape,” he said, adding that the profusion of fires so early in the year was “a scary sign of what’s to come.”

“It won’t make us pack up and move,” Mr. Archibald said. “But it definitely gives you pause.”

For Matt Procter, it was already too late to move. He returned from a trip to Northern California on Thursday night to push past fire trucks and find that the two-story apartment complex where he lived was smoldering on the ground.

“It was a pile of rubble — it looked as if they were starting construction over again,” said Mr. Procter, a 23-year-old construction worker. He said he was glad he had not lost anything important to him: “The only thing I have of real importance is my dog — he’s always with me.”

Ms. Jacob, the San Diego County supervisor, warned residents to prepare for more fires. Even though this week’s fires seemed to be winding down, she said, others were certain to follow.

“Our fire season has begun,” she said. “It was predicted by fire officials in January that this would be the worst fire season ever in the San Diego region, and we’re already seeing that their words have come true.”

Jennifer Medina contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Henry Fountain from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2014, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: California Wildfires Spread Across Hills, Leveling Homes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe